the animatic

Here is the first draft of the animatic. There is a second one which has a slightly different ending, which i'll post soon. I learnt a lot from doing this. I'm quite new when it comes to character designs and storyboards so every mistake was a lesson.






Storyboard 1 from Daniel on Vimeo

life drawings

Before I started animating I did a little research and preparation. This included life drawing, watching real ballerinas, acting out some of the movements myself and doing rough sketches of movements. Oh yeah! and listening to a lot of classical music. Ha! Its funny but it helped me to get into the right frame of mind somehow:) being as they are closely related. Drawing from life prepared me for the difficult task of animating two caricatured women. I tried to picture in my mind scenes that I knew would be a challenge, like say raising the arm into a certain position, which may seem quite basic. But I wanted it to look believable whilst being funny at the same time. The fact that I chose to use 'cartoony' characters as opposed to realistic looking figures did make it a bit easier for me as I knew that I would be able to exaggerate a bit more. But that isn't to say that I was going to take liberties:) For this reason I knew that I would have to at least have a basic understanding of what actually happens when an arm bends or a foot takes off from the floor so that I could use it as a starting point in the animation. Phew! that was a bit long winded:)

Looking at it now, I can see that her left arm is a bit wobbly, maybe too long, I must have gotten carried away:)

This was drawn using pastel. It gives a soft, flowing line, which is very hard to control and cannot really be erased.

I tried to think 'line' and 'contour' whilst drawing this model, as I knew I'd have to be thinking like that whilst animating.

anatomy studies

The above drawing and the few below were all good reminders for me and may seem pretty basic, actually they all look very basic. But this was done for a good reason. I wanted to keep it simple and not get bogged down with the precise latin names of the muscles and bones or fancy drawings.

I sketched out a quick pose and then, from memory, drew out the underlying muscles on the left. Its probably not as detailed as it could be if I had used a reference book, but it helped nonetheless.

This still has to be cleaned up and coloured. Will do when I get time...

character designs: ballet student

I had a good idea of what I wanted the student to look like from the beginning after watching the original Fantasia and seeing the larger-than-life hippos performing ballet...

character designs: ballet teacher

The above image is the final model of the ballet teacher. Below are various other designs based on the same character. I tried to keep her as simple as possible whilst still being appealing.

early designs for ballet teacher

The drawing above and the two below are some of the early character designs for the ballet teacher. They were not actually used in their entirety, but each played an important part in how I arrived at the final design for her. The one above is influenced by the late Al Hirschfeld. He is known for his caricatures and illustrations of famous americans. Their is a quality to his line which can be best described by the word 'flowing'. I was immediately struck by the potential of this quality to represent ballet. This was further reinforced after watching Fantasia 2000, which contains a short film titled 'Rhapsody in Blue' Its based on a lot of Al Hirschfeld own characters, which the Disney team got permission to use directly or re-design. His flow of line and use of simple, yet elusive graphic shapes is an element which I tried to incorporate into my own designs.

I liked some things about this early design for her face (above) and body (below), which I took into the final design. I knew that to use them as they were for the final design would not be a good choice, as I would have to animate them and keep on model throughout all the ballet movements. This could probably be achieved with a lot of hard work and time, but time was something that I was running out of so some simplification was necessary...

early concept sketches

I chose to focus on Degas painting called ballet dancer as the springboard for my final project. The brief of the project being to create a short animated film based on a painting in the National Gallery. These are a few of the concept sketches I began with as a gut reaction to this theme. Ultimately, it would be a learning process from here on. First of all, I wanted to see what my preconceptions, if any, of ballet dancers were. So I began sketching from memory and imagination and produced a number of sketches. The three I posted here show the direction I was heading in... what I learned from doing these few sketches is that, to me, one aspect of ballet that distinguishes it from other dance forms is the gracefulness of the movements. I know this is quite obvious, most people know this about ballet, but it would prove to be an important factor that would influence each stage of the project, from character designs to techniques of animation used. What I eventually decided on as the story for the animation would be: based inside a ballet studio, typical teacher/student scenario. Ha! It was a bit of a mission deciding who would be who. First I decided on the student being the large one and the teacher being the slim one. Then I reversed it but went back to the original idea. The story is not directly based on the painting, but without that painting as a springboard I dont think I would have ended up with the same plot. I particularly felt the sketch done using pastel (one of Degas favourite medium) appealed to me the most. I then thought about why I liked it, and realised the flow of the line was interesting. This then led me to check out Al Hirscfeld who I knew capitalised on this technique(more on him in later post:)